


with your shield I am invincible

by imperialhare



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Eventual Romance, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:22:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29450736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperialhare/pseuds/imperialhare
Summary: The kingdom of Marielda is ruled by the famous hero, King Samothes, and his husband, Prince-Consort Samot. Hadrian is their loyal knight.
Relationships: Hadrian/Samot (Friends at the Table), Samot/Samothes (Friends at the Table)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6
Collections: Secret Samol 2020





	with your shield I am invincible

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Secret Samol, Marcus!! I hope to get a complete fic to you soon but I hope you enjoy this first part!

A warm light glowed around the edges of the door, and Hadrian could hear the sound of laughter from inside. Even if he hadn’t known they were inside, the sound of Samot and Samothes’ voices were unmistakable to him — he had been in their service for a long time, after all. Nearly ten years now. He tapped on the door with his knuckles before turning the knob and pushing it open.

“Hadrian,” Samot said warmly. “Please come in.”

“You called for me, my Lords?”

“Just for your company,” Samot replied. The way Samot smiled at him made Hadrian blush, although he couldn’t put his finger on why.

“Come, sit,” Samothes said, and gestured at a seat across from the small table they had next to the velvet couch in their sitting room. Both of them had shed their royal garb and were dressed in night robes, and Samot had his feet up in Samothes’ lap. He had visited them in the evenings many times before, but it still felt rather scandalous for Hadrian to be seeing this. He sat down, ignoring how warm his face was.

“Am I overdressed?” Hadrian blurted out. He was wearing his tunic and pants, which was about as dressed down as he could imagine being. 

"Not at all… unless you want to be less dressed," Samot said.

“Samot, don’t tease him.”

Samot smiled, eyes sparkling. “My apologies.”

“It’s almost the tenth anniversary of your knighting, Hadrian,” Samothes said, pulling another wine glass out from underneath the table and setting it in front of Hadrian. Samot reached behind himself to grab the bottle of wine and poured Hadrian a generous serving. Hadrian always noticed the grace with which he performed the motion — he even rotated the bottle as he poured it, which Samot had once told him was to aerate the wine. Hadrian doubted he could taste the difference, but he appreciated the gesture. “And four years since you became Knight Captain. We’d like to do something to celebrate.”

“Y-you want to celebrate me?”

Samothes raised his eyebrows, smiling despite himself at Hadrian’s reaction. “Don’t act so surprised! The captain of my knights… you are as invaluable to me as my left hand.”

Hadrian felt his face flush. He was perfectly capable of maintaining his composure on the training grounds or the battlefield, but he always felt thrown off when he was in private with the royal couple, unable to fully parse the way that they treated him — with incredible kindness, yes, but it seemed somehow undeserved. 

“I’m honored, my lord. I-it isn’t for another couple of months,” Hadrian stammered. “Academy graduations will be that day, though, so it… it may not be a convenient time.”

“Then we can do the day after, or before. It’ll be small — you aren’t a man who likes fanfare, are you, Hadrian?”

Hadrian thought for a moment. “Perhaps if I had slain a great beast, or made a decisive victory, I might enjoy a little fanfare.”

“For a king, having a strong and loyal knight is a victory in itself,” Samot said.

Hadrian bowed his head, partially to hide his face in his wine glass. “You flatter me, my lords.”

From there, Hadrian managed to turn the conversation to security preparations that were being made for the annual High Sun Day parade that was to take place the following week. He was more in his element there, describing how the various units of knights and guards would be stationed along the parade route and the palace, as well as Hadrian’s personal unit that would ride alongside Samot and Samothes’ carriage. Samot’s mages had laid wards in the carriage, along the parade route, and on the royal couple’s clothing. It was a serious discussion, but also a rote one — Hadrian did this multiple times a year for events where Samot and Samothes would appear in public.

Eventually, the conversation turned from that to small talk, and finally Hadrian managed to finish his one glass of wine, a cue for him to excuse himself for the night.

“Good night, Hadrian,” Samot said. Before Hadrian could get out of his seat, Samothes stood and kissed his head — a gesture from a king to a knight, but rarely performed outside of the knighting ceremony itself. 

Blushing, Hadrian stood and saluted. “Good night, my lords,” he said, and left the sitting room.

.

As Hadrian’s footsteps faded down the hallway, Samot turned to Samothes and raised his eyebrows. “My Lord, you show him such favoritism,” he said, disguising his smirk behind his wine glass.

“Don’t call me that, Samot,” Samothes replied. I want to hear my name from my beloved’s lips, he had told Samot once, many years ago, when they were still quite new to each other, and Samot still called him Your Majesty. Nevertheless, Samot couldn’t help teasing him sometimes. “Besides, he’s a good man, and a good knight, and as king I’ll show him favoritism if I want to.”

“You’ll make other people jealous, Samothes.”

Samothes looked puzzled, and said, with great incredulity, “You?”

“No, not me,” Samot said, laughing. “Your courtiers, other knights…”

“It’s not like you don’t show him favoritism yourself,” Samothes pointed out. “There are plenty of courtiers jockeying around you at all times as well, and I doubt your frankly egregious flirting goes unnoticed.”

“Me? Flirt?” Samot replied with mock outrage. “Well, in my defense — he’s a good man, and a good knight,” Samot parroted back at him, and they both grinned at each other and laughed. 

*

The summer solstice, known as High Sun Day, always seemed to catch people up in the holiday crunch, and the royal couple and their palace staff were no different. It was the 30th anniversary of the kingdom of Marielda and therefore of Samothes’ reign, which made this year a particularly celebrated one. Tourists from outside of Marielda were crowding the city’s inns, eager to experience the festivities.

For his part, Hadrian managed assignments for the city and palace knight corps, including his own unit — the King’s Knights, ten knights who were the most favored of Lord Samothes himself, who had ridden beside him during many journeys and battles.

“With your shields I am invincible,” Samothes said to them as he climbed into the royal parade carriage. Hadrian had heard it many times when Samothes rallied them for battle — in this situation he said it with a grin, a little joke for his closest friends. As for the knights, all they had to do was walk in formation around the royal carriage. It happened every year, and was frankly quite easy so far as the job of “guarding” went, but the famous knights of Marielda knew they were as much part of the spectacle as the King and Prince were.

It was halfway through the High Sun Day parade route — Hadrian remembered that he looked away from Samothes and out towards the crowd. The air was hot and filled with the cheering of citizens who had come to watch, crowded up against the protective fences that had been placed along the street.

The first thing he noticed was that his horse spooked, nervously trying to turn around in its tracks before Hadrian pulled on the reins.

The second thing was Samot screaming.

He whirled around immediately to look towards Samot, sitting aside Samothes in the open carriage — and then, to the hilt of a blade that had somehow, horribly, found its target in the center of Samothes’ chest. Samothes’ face was frozen in an expression of shock. Hadrian remembered the way his heart pounded as he called for the parade to stop, for the medics and healers to come — the sickening noise as Samot wrenched the blade free from his husband’s chest and cast it aside to press his hands over the wound, palms glowing with magic.

Where had the knife come from? Hadrian hurried to snatch it up from the floor of the carriage where Samot had thrown it. It felt strange to hold, and it pulsed strangely with an energy that seemed to suck the light away from its surroundings. The crowd roared in panic but the sound was distant to him. The blood on the blade seemed so terribly fresh.

“Hadrian, don’t touch it,” Samot said sharply, but Hadrian didn’t want to just put it down on the ground. He was calm. There were correct actions to take for almost every situation. A royal healer was climbing into the carriage now, that was good. Hadrian felt outside himself as he shouted for someone to bring him extra gauze, as he took it from one of the doctors and used it to wrap the knife, which was a surprisingly solid object despite whatever horrible magic had been used to create it.

The day after that was a haze. He knew he had assisted the other knights in dispersing the crowd. He knew he had escorted Samot, the healers, and Samothes’ body (because he was dead, he was already dead when Samot wrenched the blade out) back to the palace. 

And he remembered how, hours and hours later, Samot sent all his other attendants and guards away from his bedchamber and told Hadrian to stay, and he had clung to Hadrian’s shoulder and wept. 

“Hadrian, tell me it isn’t true,” he sobbed, and Hadrian couldn’t do anything but wrap his arms around him. “Tell me that Samothes isn’t dead. What will I do without him? He can’t be dead. He was undefeated… He couldn’t be killed...”

It was then that Hadrian began to weep silently, clutching Samot tightly — he had sworn an oath of fealty to Samothes and had loved him, for the ten years he had spent as a knight but also for all his life, and in some small way that meant that he could understand the depth of Samot’s grief.

*

Custom dictated that a funeral had to be held within four days, and ideally sooner, so that the deceased could be put to rest with the proper respect for their body. Cruel that this gave so little time to grieve, Samot thought, through the two sleepless days as he oversaw arrangements for the state funeral — public mourners, both voluntary and paid, a crew to clean and prepare the tomb, the body, the priests, the parade, and of course, eulogies to be written. His famous gift for words seemed to leave him as he leaned over his writing desk with a pen in his hand, desperately trying to think of something to say that was impersonal enough to read before a crowd of thousands of people, yet honest enough to his grief that he could say them without regret.

Samothes had died too quickly to have final words for him, Samot thought. How horrid it was that in the end his husband had just been a man like any other, and just as easily killed as any animal. 

“My Lord?”

Samot raised his head to the face peering in at him from the doorway. Relief made some of the warmth go back to his fingers as he realized it was Hadrian. There were very few other people he felt that he could bear speaking to in that moment.

“Oh, Hadrian. Come in. How are preparations going with the knights?”

“They’re going… well. I have it under control.” Hadrian crossed the room and nervously hovered for a moment before deciding to sit down in the chair across from Samot’s desk. “I wanted to check in on you. Are you alright, my Lord? M-maybe that’s a stupid question, but...”

“Yes — well, no, not particularly. I imagine, in — my god, who knows how long from now, when things have settled a little, I shall sit down and let my grief consume me.” Samot smiled weakly at him, feeling that he had made a poor joke. “Thank you, Hadrian, sincerely. I am grateful to have you by my side. How are you doing?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. A knight who loses his liege is not so different from a man who loses his spouse, is he not?”

Hadrian pondered this for a moment. “I… don’t know.” He paused. “I feel like I failed to protect him. We fought together so many times, and I raised my shield for him so many times, and in the end he died without there even being an attack I could see.”

Hadrian was staring resolutely at his hands, as Samot knew he did often when he was embarrassed.

“Thank you, Hadrian.”

“No problem,” Hadrian mumbled. He glanced upwards, startled. “Uh — for what?”

“For having loved him too.”

Hadrian looked back down at his hands, then back up at Samot. “Of course.”

*

Around two months after the funeral, a diplomat from the northwest arrived seeking an audience with Samot. She was from Velas, and while they had extensive trade agreements with Marielda under King Samothes, the change of leadership warranted a renewal of terms. Samot was not yet king — he was still called Prince in all affairs — but it was a given that he would take the throne very soon, within a year at the very longest.

“It seems the best course of action is for me to travel to Velas with a delegation myself,” Samot said. His office hosted a rotating mill of advisors at all times, constantly coming in and out with different concerns and information. Hadrian and the rest of the King’s Knights took shifts on bodyguard duty, but Hadrian’s shifts were the longest and most frequent, as per Samot’s own request. Most of the time he didn’t do much but stand behind Samot, observing their surroundings, and making occasional conversation when the two of them were alone, but Samot was often too busy to talk. “It would make the strongest case for our continued interest in diplomacy between our two states.”

“You’d be at risk while traveling,” one of the advisors said. “Whoever assassinated Lord Samothes may be after you as well, Lord Samot.”

“They could have killed me quite easily if they wanted to — I was right next to him, after all,” Samot replied. There was no anger in his voice, but he flipped over the next piece of paper on his desk a little harder than the others. “Besides, I could use a little travel. I’ve been sitting here so long my legs may rot off.”

“Your Highness…”

“I’ll have the King’s Knights, and I’ll take Cunningham and Halisham with me. I’ll be safe from anything it’s reasonable to be safe from. Right, Sir Hadrian?”

“Oh — I believe so, my Lord.”

Samot had to have the argument a few times with a few different advisors, but in the end it was settled, and a delegation of knights, diplomats, navigators, cooks, attendants, mages, merchants, and because it was Samot, musicians and dancers, set forth from the island to travel north to Velas.

They camped most of those nights, since permanent settlements were sparse along the western plains. Hadrian slept in Samot’s tent with him, as requested. It felt wrong, to Hadrian, to see Samot sleeping in a bedroll on the ground, but he didn’t seem to mind it.

“Are you comfortable, my lord?”

“Don’t worry. I grew up in caravans on these very plains and slept like this often… Although it has been many years since then. I’m not as young as I was.” A small, sad smile creased Samot’s lips. “Still, I think I prefer it to my bed in the palace right now.”

Hadrian looked down at his hands. “I… don’t know much about your life before you came to Marielda.”

"Well, that’s only natural. I hardly ever talk about it.” Samot sighed, gazing up at the ceiling of the tent. “I loved these plains, but then, when I met Samothes… I knew I would go wherever he took me.” 

Hadrian glanced over at Samot’s expression, wanted to reach out and put his hand over his prince’s hand, but it seemed all at once too small and too bold a gesture. Instead, he said, “I… saw you, on your wedding day.”

“Well, the whole city did, did they not?”

“No, I mean — I was at the ceremony...”

Samot looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed. “Oh, I remember now — Primo said that two students from the Knight Academy had snuck in and caused quite a fuss. Was that you?”

“Me and Hella, yeah.”

“Sir Hella doesn’t seem like the type.”

“She’s not. She was just there because she knew I wouldn’t do it myself.”

Samot laughed. “A good friend, then. How old were you at the time?”

“Fifteen.”

“That would have made you… a first year student? Hardly a fledgling from the nest,” Samot teased. “Did you get into trouble?”

“The headmaster was furious,” Hadrian said, a sheepish grin crossing his face. “We were put on duty mucking out the stables for weeks.”

“Poor things!”

“It was worth it, though. I… always remember how the two of you looked that day. I was really proud that I was going to be your knight someday. And you seemed like… you really loved each other."

“Oh, we did… We did, and we only loved each other more as time went on,” Samot said. Something quavered in his voice, and Hadrian wondered if he shouldn’t have brought it up.

“I could tell, my Lord.”

"Hadrian…"

"Yes, my Lord?"

"You're very sweet. You could make someone fall in love with you like this," Samot said, a playful smile coming to his lips.

Hadrian blushed. “Well, nothing like that has happened yet.”

“Ah — it’s because we… because I work you too hard.”

“Oh, no, my Lord, I… wanted nothing more than to serve you and Lord Samothes. I don’t know what I would do with myself otherwise.”

“Even so… I wonder if we take too much from you.”

“You haven’t taken anything,” Hadrian insisted, but Samot didn’t reply further beyond that. 

In the silence that ensued they simply looked at each other for a lingering moment, and Hadrian felt that he should do something — should say something, should move his arm — but to what end? He kept still. He was a knight and Samot was his liege — if Samot wanted him to do something, surely he would ask, or at least prompt him somehow. That was how it worked. 

But Samot didn’t, and eventually they were simply lying there in the flickering light of the lantern.

Eventually, Samot said, “We should get some sleep.” The magical flame he had summoned to the lantern went out. Samot pulled his bedroll up around himself, and turned onto his side, facing away from Hadrian.


End file.
